Structural System Selection Using the Integration of Multi-Attribute-Decision-Making (MADM) Methods

A structural system carries all loads acting on the building and transfers them effectively to the soil through the foundation. Since it is the essential component of a building, selecting the most appropriate structural system is one of the critical decisions in the structural design. The design team, which consists of engineers and architects, is responsible for determining the structural system that will satisfy the owner's and end user's needs as well as the legal requirements. Due to the fact that a number of compromising and conflicting criteria may affect the structural system selection process, it is a difficult task and it should be considered as a multi-attribute-decision-making (MADM) problem. The main objective of this study is to provide the design teams with a MADM approach that will assist them in selecting the most appropriate structural system in a more objective and systematic manner. In the proposed approach, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to compute the weights of the criteria and Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) is employed to rank the structural system alternatives. In order to demonstrate how the proposed can be applied in a real life problem, the structural system of a housing project in Istanbul, Turkey is selected via this approach. The findings of the model were discussed with the decision making team in the studied project and they stated that the proposed approach could be easily employed as a guideline in selecting the most appropriate structural system from the managerial viewpoint. This paper is the revised version of the paper that has been published in the proceedings of the Creative Construction Conference 2018 (Polat et al., 2018)